A/N: thanks to jarofclay42 for reading over ;v; written for OTP Battle
f(x)
Parallel lines must have the same slopes, Kuroko repeats to himself, moving onto his next cue card. Their paths run along next to each other, but they never meet.
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"Aomine-kun, do you want to come study with me at the library?" Kuroko had asked, peering sideways at Aomine, but he'd been staring straight ahead. The streetlights and headlights of cars had cast eerie shadows over his face, and it was hard to decipher the expression he'd been wearing.
"Nah. Don't feel like it."
Kuroko bit the inside of his cheek. "You won't be able to participate in matches if you don't do good, Aomine-kun."
Aomine stopped walking, but he was still looking at something up ahead. "You don't get it, Tetsu. I don't feel like it."
Kuroko distinctly remembers the fleeting whisper of something sad in his voice (and the way Aomine had been avoiding his eyes), the few forlorn inches separating them (they hadn't bumped fists in quite a while), and wondering what it had been that he was looking at - if it had been nothing in particular, or if it had been something too far in the distance for either of them to see clearly.
Aomine didn't wait for an answer, and started walking again, his strides too long and fast for Kuroko to match.
(He hadn't waited for him to catch up, either.)
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Perpendicular lines have slopes that are the negative inverse of each other; they intersect once, and never again.
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On the way home after a - Wednesday evening's? - practice with Kagami glowering in the corner with his injury, Kuroko spotted Aomine on the sidewalk, on the other side of the crosswalk. Kuroko had been unclear on why Aomine had been out at that time of the night and so close to Seirin, no less.
He'd waited for the pedestrian lights to turn green, and saw that Aomine had stopped to wait as well.
They brush by without a word, and Kuroko couldn't even bring himself to speak up and say hello.
(They're opposites, but that had never stopped them from anything before.)
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The function of 'x' changes correspondingly to 'x'. Kuroko whizzes through the practice problems, but when he checks them over after he'd finished, he finds that he'd been careless in substituting 'x' in the equations. He agonizes for a moment if he should redo them, but when he flips to the next page of the workbook, there are more similar questions. This time, he does it right.
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"Sometimes, I feel like we weren't meant to be." Aomine tilts his head back against the railings to look at the sky. Kuroko wonders how it all happened, how it hurt so bad yet in the end it was never really about basketball, when for them, it was only ever about basketball. "Kise told me that too, when I bumped into him at Winter Cup."
Kuroko gazes at the empty field below, recalling that he'd come to school ridiculously early one morning to scratch out his promise in the dirt. "Maybe," he replies, after some time. "Or maybe we were always just meant to go our separate ways. But…"
"But?"
Kuroko takes a breath. When he exhales again, he feels so much more lighter. "…but I think that one way or another, we'll always end up together."
Aomine arches a brow.
"It'll be different this time," Kuroko tells him, and he watches a smile stretch across Aomine's lips as he leans over; all Kuroko can really feel is Aomine's body pressing against his and all he can really see are his eyes.
"Just a bit," Aomine says softly, and presses his forehead against Kuroko's. Kuroko closes his eyes.
Just enough to make a difference.